750 free compute hours really worth??,Information about free tier 750 hours compute hours??,Is playfab sufficient for initial game release??

Question

question

sanjayhillstudios@gmail.com asked Mar 11, '21

750 free compute hours really worth??,Information about free tier 750 hours compute hours??,Is playfab sufficient for initial game release??

Hello i came across playfab recently.They have 100k users limit which is great but they have only 750 hours limit which comes around a month.What is the use of 100k users if they have a limit of only 750 hours.A game to get popular should go through many releases??.

,

Hello i recently came across playfab from a youtube video.I got into surprise as it had limits of 100k free players.But it said that it's limit is 750 compute hours.If I divide this by 24 then it results around a month.So that means I have only one month of free tier.My game might not even reach 100k users in a month.So what is the use for say 100k players when you give only 750 compute hours??.Thank you

pricing

10 |1200

Attachments: Up to 2 attachments (including images) can be used with a maximum of 512.0 KiB each and 1.0 MiB total.

Answer 1 · 2021-03-11T02:42:48Z

brendan answered Mar 11, '21

We provide 750 Core hours per month so that developers have that available for testing. Since a month can have up to 744 hours, that would allow to run one single-core VM for a month. The intent is that most game developers can do their build tests ahead of release without generating costs (most developers usually need to use VMs with more cores, but since they commonly only need a few days of test time for a build, that usually works out just fine). It is not intended to provide a way to run a title completely free. Server time does have very real cost to us, which does have to be accounted for - we cannot provide unlimited server hosting for free.

A key thing to make sure you do, in order to minimize your usage is to make sure to shut down running servers when you're not testing, by setting the Standby server count to 0 for all regions you've configured. It's important to bear in mind that Standby servers are running on VMs that have been provisioned and are actively running for your title - they're just not running your executable until they're needed.

8

10 |1200

Attachments: Up to 2 attachments (including images) can be used with a maximum of 512.0 KiB each and 1.0 MiB total.

agniesportsyt commented · Mar 11, 2021 at 03:19 AM

@Brendan So it's 750 hours per month. That means our game can use the server more than one month if it doesn't exceeds compute time of 750 hours/month... right? That leads me to a question can we use the free server for our game (not only for testing but also for the build release) ?

0 ·

brendan agniesportsyt commented · Mar 11, 2021 at 11:02 PM

It means that you have 750 Core hours available for the specific server models and in the specific regions detailed in the docs: Billing for PlayFab Multiplayer Servers 2.0 - PlayFab | Microsoft Docs. If you use only the server models and regions from that, and the total number of hours you run them in a month, times the number of VMs you run, times the number of cores per VM, totals to less than 750, you wouldn't pay any server hosting costs for that month.

We don't restrict what servers you use for titles, regardless of whether they're live or not. So yes, you can use those 750 Core hours in a live title.

0 ·

agniesportsyt brendan commented · Mar 14, 2021 at 08:05 AM

We want the server region to be India. So is it possible that we can set the free server region to India. Thank you in advance, I really appreciate your work Brendan

0 ·

Show more comments

Jeremey Zela commented · Mar 16, 2021 at 05:41 PM

Brendan, I have been doing some research on multiplayer pricing related to our upcoming title and I came upon this post. I have a question regarding this "750 Core Hours Per Month" that you reference here. Does this mean if we choose a multi-core VM in the build screen that we would blow past this free 750 because it's 4 cores?

So, for example, if we choose "F4s V2 (4 Cores)" which allows us to run 20 application servers and we run that for 1 month will we have 2,250 billable hours for that month? (4 cores X 750 - 750 free hours)?

0 ·

brendan Jeremey Zela commented · Mar 16, 2021 at 05:56 PM

If your question is, does an F4sv2 use four Core hours (since it has four cores) per real-world hour, the answer is yes. But Core hours are only used when you're considering the free Core hours we provide. That doesn't affect the pricing on paid usage of server types - the pricing for paid hours of each server type is as shown in the detailed server pricing page. Multiplayer Servers - detailed price sheet - PlayFab | Microsoft Docs

So, if you run an F4sv2 (the number of Servers you can run on the Virtual Machine isn't really relevant to pricing that server), you would consume the 750 free Core hours for the month in 187.5 hours (a bit under 8 days). After that, you would be charged for usage based on the total runtime of the VM, using the pricing in the detailed pricing sheet, above.

One other quick thing to note: Total runtime is accumulated when the VM stops. So a VM that starts on the last day of the month, but doesn't stop until the next day (the first of the next month) will count on the new month's usage, not the month when it started.

0 ·

Jeremey Zela brendan commented · Mar 16, 2021 at 08:24 PM

Thanks, Brendan. I think I'm starting to understand a little better. However, this one fact is tripping me up still:

On our Billing Summary for March we see this:

Multiplayer : Vm instance hours
First 750.00 hours - Fv2 - US East 188.24 hours Free

This seems to represent the 750 free hours are really VM hours. Or at least, I'm not additionally seeing the core hours listed anywhere on the summary. They would be near 750 at this point for March, I believe. What am I missing?

Thanks, again.

0 ·

Show more comments

Answer 2 · 2021-08-16T03:52:59Z

Ryan Steckler answered Aug 16, '21

It's worth noting that @Brendan 's answer may have been correct in the past, but there's not currently an option to choose a single-core machine in the server configuration. The lowest configuration you can choose is a dual core machine. Therefore, there's no way to run an instance for a full month. You'll need to manually move your server to 0 standby servers for at least half the month if you want to avoid charges during development.

The best way (I think) to manage this is to only use the MPS server for testing MPS specific features. Use your own local server for the bulk of your development and testing and just sanity check every so often on the real MPS server.

10 |1200

Attachments: Up to 2 attachments (including images) can be used with a maximum of 512.0 KiB each and 1.0 MiB total.

question